typical JRPG teenaged dick-weed who goes in head-first and seems to wield a blade better than anyone else on the planet.

Uh...have you actually played the game? Shulk is likely the most intelligent character in the party in Xenoblade. He has his moments of charging towards the enemies yelling and swinging his sword, but unless he's in mortal peril he tends to be quite quiet and thoughtful, and generally has things sussed out way better than some other members of your party. If there's explaining to be done in Xenoblade, you can bet Shulk will be doing it. Plus it probably isn't that hard to be handy in combat if you know what your enemies are going to do before they actually do it. The game doesn't really hesitate to paint Dunban as the more skilled of the two. Shulk is just your average science geek who happens to be able to see the future.

Not that Xenoblade doesn't have its share of anime archetypes. It totally does. I'm just not convinced Shulk is the kind of hero you're painting him as. He's not a typical fiery-tempered, bratty shounen manga hero. Not that I thought he was an especially brilliant character either, but he's a little bit more interesting than Generic JRPG Hero #597. And a lot more interesting than the muscle man you mentioned, who really is little more than a walking cliche.

typical JRPG teenaged dick-weed who goes in head-first and seems to wield a blade better than anyone else on the planet.

Uh...have you actually played the game? Shulk is likely the most intelligent character in the party in Xenoblade. He has his moments of charging towards the enemies yelling and swinging his sword, but unless he's in mortal peril he tends to be quite quiet and thoughtful, and generally has things sussed out way better than some other members of your party. If there's explaining to be done in Xenoblade, you can bet Shulk will be doing it. Plus it probably isn't that hard to be handy in combat if you know what your enemies are going to do before they actually do it. The game doesn't really hesitate to paint Dunban as the more skilled of the two. Shulk is just your average science geek who happens to be able to see the future.

Not that Xenoblade doesn't have its share of anime archetypes. It totally does. I'm just not convinced Shulk is the kind of hero you're painting him as. He's not a typical fiery-tempered, bratty shounen manga hero. Not that I thought he was an especially brilliant character either, but he's a little bit more interesting than Generic JRPG Hero #597. And a lot more interesting than the muscle man you mentioned, who really is little more than a walking cliche.

My Japanese is still pretty shitty, so I missed the depth of the characters. I still hate how heroes are still relatively perceived the same way. Too many JRPG characters seem to stick to what they know and rarely develop or display some other emotion other than what you see in the first couple of hours. The game was still a great experience (the character models left a bit to be desired, but the rest was amazing...for wii especially)

hey everyone, apparently there's going to be some sort of pre-order bonus (not sure if its exclusive to japan game stores or not) but I've purchased one from this seller on eBay, if you guys are interested, there's 2 left up for grabs and I think its at a reasonable price, considering it'll come with an OST and a Visual book. I'll leave the link here you guys.

Sensationalist journalism does it again. Nintendo didn't say it wasn't coming out here, they said they had no comment. That doesn't mean anything.

In fact, I recently heard that at a recent event, Iwata stated that he wanted to try to get Soma Bringer and 7th Dragon out in the West finally. If that's true, then The Last Story would easily follow suit. People need to stop jumping all over non-informative comments like they mean everything int he world.